Recollection

In 2025 I participated in ‘A Gift for Others’, a collaboration between the UCL Cancer Institute and Cambridge School of Visual and Performing Arts. During a visit to the Cancer Institute, I was particularly touched by one of the patient testimonials from a member of Madlani Cancer Support, details of which resonated with my own (non-medical) experience of shock and trauma. I found that some visual and textual elements in the research talks by PhD volunteers and from the laboratories that we toured, stood out to me as poetic and ripe with metaphor. The cellular samples under the microscope look like cartographic landscapes to me. Scientists spoke of ‘a cell frozen in time’, which echoed the patient’s recollection that ‘time stood still’ once the reality of her diagnosis began to sink in. Prior to this moment of stasis, she spoke of a chaotic barrage of thoughts, like a swinging pendulum getting faster, as her doctor explained the facts. I felt moved by these similarities and contrasts across the day.

My piece is a mixed-media animation, including pencil on paper, digital rotoscope, ink on 16mm leader, 3D modelling in Blender, and digitised archival material. I have combined medical imagery with found pieces of text, and abstract marks that can be read as visceral, internal processes. Animation of repeated movements are sourced from a recording I made of one of the scientist’s hand gestures reflected in the glass of some of the equipment, as well as reconstructing a memory of my own traumatic past, showing bodies both fluid and stuck.

Written, directed and animated by Ali Aschman

2025

The video is intended to play on a loop, with no specific start or end point.